After reading this article, I'm not convinced that the writer has used any previous versions of Flash. The "new" timeline 'zoom and preview' features, and drag and drop frame movement that he refers to have been features since Flash 3! In addition, the color palette, although now on nifty 'tabbed' palettes, has taken a huge step backward. simple steps, like changing one color of a gradient fill, now takes an unacceptable amount of time. (For example, in Flash 4, the aforementioned procedure takes 6 clicks. In Flash 5, it now takes 17. Overall, the Flash 5 upgrade is neccessary (if for nothing other than a real scripting language, and shared libaries), but not neccessarily an enjoyable process. - my two cents :)

While I agree with most of the review, I've never been too keen on using the drawing tools in Flash. Being a longtime user of Illustrator, its a no-brainer for me to do my drawing work there and easily import it into Flash. This also allows me to keep my creative on a single page in a single Illustrator file which I can also use as a design doc for clients,etc.

So I don't really miss Flash's lack of drawing tools, though I'm still happy they added Bezier tools.